Numlock News: May 19, 2026 • Geologists, El Niño, Pipefish

May 19, 2026

By Christie Aschwanden

Walt is on vacation, so today’s edition comes to you from Christie Aschwanden. She is co-host of Emerging Form, a radio show and podcast about creative processes, and host and producer of Uncertain, a podcast from Scientific American. Her New York Times bestselling book, Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery, includes stories about the scientifically verified benefits of beer for female runners, Tom Brady’s ridiculous pajamas and Usain Bolt’s gold medal-winning diet.

Movie Geologists Die Fast

About a decade ago, some Swedish geologists were chatting over coffee when the conversation turned to how their profession is depicted in films. It seemed like when there’s a geologist in the movie, he’s usually dead before it ends (most Hollywood geologists are men). Being scientists, the geologists decided to run the math, and sure enough, it’s true. They’ve been running the numbers periodically since then, and in their latest analysis, they found 202 movie geologists appearing in 141 films released between 1919 and 2023 and calculated that these fictional geologists had about a one in three chance of dying in the film. The top causes of death were murder, work-related injuries (falling into a crater or being incinerated in an oil pit) and being killed by or because of extra-terrestrial encounters.

Geology Today

El Niño is Back! Will Snow Return Too?

Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center issued its latest El Niño forecast. As of May 14, there’s an 82 percent chance of an El Niño this summer, with a 96 percent chance that these conditions will persist through winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. This storm could be particularly strong, so people on the West Coast should brace themselves for high tides and strong surf, while people in the mid-Atlantic states can expect more storm surges. Above average rain could hit the U.S. Gulf and Southeast Coasts. In better news, the pattern could bring more snow to Colorado, whose ski resorts and reservoirs are still reeling from a record snow drought this past season.

National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center

Mr. Snuffleupagus of the Sea

Scientists working in the Southwest Pacific Ocean have identified a new species of ghost pipefish — a type of sea creature related to seahorses. Measuring between one and 1.5 inches long, the newly discovered pipefish has a long coat of messy red hair, giving it an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Snuffleupagus (friend to Big Bird on the children’s TV show “Sesame Street”). Biologists David Harasti and Graham Short decided to honor this resemblance in the scientific name they bestowed on it — Solenostomus snuffleupagus. It’s the seventh known species of ghost pipefish. Now who is going to discover a scruffy green specimen, Solenostomus grover?

Scientific American, Meghan Bartels

LLM Hallucinations Are Polluting Science

It’s well known that large language models are prone to “hallucinations” (known as bullshit, when produced by humans). How often do LLMs hallucinate scientific citations? A group of researchers conducted an audit of 111 million references from 2.5 million papers in four databases — arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN and PubMed Central. Their estimates found that these databases contained a minimum of 146,932 hallucinated citations in papers published in 2025 alone. Just as bad, they found that hallucinated references “disproportionately assign credit to already prominent and male scholars, suggesting that LLM-generated errors may reinforce existing inequities in scientific recognition.”

Zhenyue Zhao et al, arXiv

DOGE Cuts Sparked Violence

Last year, Elon Musk bragged about feeding the United States Agency for International Development into the woodchopper. A study published last week in the journal Science estimates that this sudden withdrawal of aid was associated with a bump in violent conflicts in Africa. With the USAID shutdown, there was a rapid increase in the likelihood of violence, the severity of violence and the lethality of violence across Africa, study co-author Austin L. Wright told 404Media. In areas that lost aid, the probability of protests and riots rose by 10 percent, and so did the number of conflicts. Meanwhile, battle-related fatalities went up by more than nine percent. This comes after research published in February calculating that the destruction of USAID caused 762,000 preventable deaths, 500,000 of them children.

404Media, Becky Ferreira

Bats Help the Economy

Bat populations are falling, largely because of a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome. That’s a big deal, because bats play an oversized role in the agricultural economy. Female brown bats can eat their weight in insects on a daily basis, and their favored diet includes crop-destroying pests as well as mosquitoes. Bats also pollinate many food crops and their guano is a highly valued fertilizer. As white-nose syndrome reduces bat numbers, the estimated economic loss to agriculture exceeds $420 million per year.

The Conversation

Ted Turner’s Land Legacy

When media titan Ted Turner died earlier this month, he was one of the largest individual landowners in North America, with holdings that included more than a dozen big ranches in six Western states. He brought bison back to many of his ranches, and reintroduced Mexican wolves and endangered black-footed ferrets, too. Much of his two million acres were managed for conservation and environmental projects, and his 363,000-acre Armendaris Ranch in New Mexico, has a permanent conservation easement that shields it from development. Before his death, Turner created an agricultural research organization, which will ensure his lands will continue to be protected from future development and subdivision.

High Country News, Christine Peterson

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

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